


Private Geographies

by murg



Category: Original Work
Genre: Child Neglect, Corpses, Gen, Global Warming, Growing Up, Male-Female Friendship, Metaphors, Teenagers, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-15 09:33:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19293019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murg/pseuds/murg
Summary: Kat and I find something that should have stayed buried.





	Private Geographies

 

 

It used to snow here, behind the old sawmill in East Town. It’d cover up the junkyard tires and the permanently parked cars, making them look like shrouded artifacts abandoned in some attic. The road snaking up to Morris Hill turned into a white river, knee-deep. All the kids would wade through this water after the first snowfall, fingers wrapped into the biting cold of the chain-link fence before they sledded from the top to the remnants of their footprints at the base.

The snow only stayed that way for a day or two, then it became speckled with dirt and soot. Under the dim street lamps, everything looked like mottled malt balls, like puckered shrapnel scars. A war zone. And in the stillness of the air, so cold it dug deep into their lungs, there was an emotion close to acceptance. A sense that everything had its place, just as it was, no better or worse than it should be.

Kat’s never known the snow here; she’s only known the tires and cars as immovable statues, resolutely stoic and slowly rusting under the acid rain hues of autumn.

The chain-link fence lining the top of Morris Hill, covered in old vines and Private Property signs, stares dourly at our swinging legs. Kat’s lips are stained with blue raspberry Slush Puppie. Late October and we’ve got southern breezes blowing through our heads, in one ear and out the other.

Kat doesn’t know the world in the same way I do. She thinks blue raspberries grow on bushes the same way red and black raspberries do. And that’s okay, but it means that she doesn’t understand what this scene looks like to me. She doesn’t see the street lamps or the stale gray, crusted-over mufflers. We might as well be in different places.

“I don’t want to go home,” Kat says.

I don’t ask why, because I know her reasons. They’re legitimate reasons, but they’re also ugly reasons. The usual reasons.

“Then don’t,” I answer. The usual answer.

“You know it isn’t that simple.”

“I know.”

“So don’t bug me.” She tosses her half-empty cup off the side of the overhang.

“Okay.” I watch it roll down the grassy hill, coming to a stop where some nestled beer cans have made their home. Blue ice sloshes out the top, soaking the soil.

“I feel like it’s gonna rain,” Kat says.

“Not a cloud in the sky.”

“So? I said ‘feel like,’ not ‘know.’”

“Okay.” There are electrical wires on the other side of the chain-link fence, with yellow signs sticking out of the tall grass around them. They bar entry to the old sawmill. It went out of operation long before I came into this world.

Kat cracks her back, staring at the sky, blue as her mouth. There’s not much to say. Kat doesn’t want to go home and I don’t want to go anywhere.

“I live for the weekend,” she says. “I don’t want to do English homework. Can I copy yours in homeroom, on Monday?”

I hate English class. It’s depressing and—worse—it’s boring, so I always get the homework over with as soon as possible. “Yeah, sure.”

“Cool.” She leans back on the concrete. Her tank top rides up, revealing her stick-and-poke tattoo peeking over her shorts. It’s a crooked fox face, allegedly attached to a man’s body. She told me it’s a werewolf, but it really looks like a fox. She told me he’s a naked werewolf and so he’s got his wang out. She said she was drunk and she and Dylan thought it’d be really funny. He’s the only boy who’s seen my pussy, she said, and he didn’t even get to try the goods.

These back lots are so ugly. The cramped field below Morris Hill on one side of the road, the abandoned linens factory and its associated parking lots on the other. The sawmill looms over all of East Town, crooked and snarling. I wouldn’t have come here, but Kat likes it because it’s right behind the convenience store. So I do come here, every Friday, even though I don’t want to come here.

“Man, it’s getting cold,” Kat says.

“Put a coat on.”

“I don’t see you wearing a coat.”

“I don’t think it’s cold.”

“Fuck you, man, I’m freezing my tits off.” Kat thinks anything below 70 is cold. She grew up in South Carolina, though, so I forgive her for it. Kat doesn’t know the world in the same way I do.

“When I was a kid, it’d be snowing by now.”

“It’s mid-October. I call bull.”

“Why would I lie?”

Kat doesn’t say anything. I follow her gaze to the chain-link fence. Then I look at the base of the hill, at Kat’s spilled Slush Puppie and the half-buried beer cans. I imagine an anthropologist digging them up, someday, their labels faded but the aluminum still shining through the rust. What is this, they will say. An ancient drinking vessel, they will say. A ceremonial chalice.

“Sometimes, it would hit negative-ten by the end of November.”

“Wow.” Kat swings her legs, her knees covered in razor burn scabs. “When did it stop getting so cold?”

I stare at the beer cans. Kat doesn’t ask me again. “We’d go sledding,” I say, “on Morris Hill. But never from the top, because the top is Private Property.”

“Who owns it?”

“I don’t know. There’s an old sawmill, but it’s been out of business for forever.”

“Oh, okay.”

The truth is, I don’t really know when it stopped snowing in October. It just sort of happened. Or not happened. No one really minded; I hated shoveling, anyways. Ugly thoughts squirm in my head, reeking like week-old trash. I feel out of place, sitting on concrete, old soda trapped in my gums, looking down on tossed tires and cars nailed to the back road leading up to Morris Hill’s rusted fence. The unseen world. Barred off from us.

It’s so hot for October.

“I don’t want to go home,” Kat says.

“I don’t, either.”

We sit. Kat pushes herself up, with the meat of her palms. “I’m gonna climb that hill.”

“Why?”

She slips onto the shaggy grass. “Do I need a reason? I just feel like doing it.”

“Okay.”

The grass sweeps against the skin just above her socks. I think about deer ticks. I’m wearing jeans and boots, my weekday uniform. I own three pairs of jeans and no shorts. I don’t need to fear deer ticks, but Kat does. That doesn’t stop her, though. She grew up in South Carolina. She doesn’t think about deer ticks.

The hill is tall and wide. We used to sled down it, when it used to get cold. But it doesn’t get cold anymore, and maybe it never will again.

Kat tromps up the hill like she’s in a military parade, wrapping her fingers around the chain-link fence teetering near the top. Her knuckles are white, the bones shining beneath her thin skin. “You coming or are you too pussy?”

“I’m not a pussy,” I say, “I just don’t want climb up a fence. I’m lazy.”

She rolls her eyes. “Don’t gotta climb it, numbskull. The fence ends right at that tree.”

“Well, maybe I don’t feel like squeezing between a fence and a tree.”

“Then you can wait outside. Or dig a tunnel underneath. Whatever the fuck you want, man.”

I’m not a pussy, so I follow her through the tick-grass, too green for October.

She glances at me as she slides past the edge of the fence, the whites of her eyes showing. I take her place after she dislodges her shoulder, the tree’s bark scraping against the nape of my neck.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Things look the same on the other side of the fence. Overgrown grass and sagging trees. It rained yesterday, so the ground is damp in the shade. My boot sinks a quarter inch into the clay.

Kat snaps a young stick off a tree and pokes at the grass in front of us. “We shouldn’t be here,” I say. “This is Private Property.”

“Sh,” she murmurs, crouching.

I don’t move, as she shuffles across the ground, toward a mass of vines. Maybe being in the woods is novel to someone like Kat. She’s from South Carolina, after all. She grew up in a suburb. She’s scuttling across the ground like she’s in some spy film, trying to avoid enemy eyes. It’s a bit silly.

“You smell that?” she whispers.

“No.”

She stabs at the vines. “Seriously? You don’t smell that?”

I wrinkle my nose, concentrating on the air. It’s musty and bitter, like old skunk spray.

“Animal bones,” Kat says.

I crane my neck to get a look, following the line of her drooping stick. At first, I don’t think I see anything, but there they are, tangled with vines and nestled under the limbs of a bush. They’re stained brown, old, picked clean and left to slowly sink under the earth.

“Gross.”

“I don’t think it’s gross,” she says. “I might take it home and clean it up. I have a necklace that uses a rat’s skull, you know that?”

“Still gross.”

“Things die, get over it, man. Might as well make the most of it.”

I open my mouth to tell her it’s still really gross, but the line of tension that shivers through Kat’s shoulders stops my jaw.

There’s a bit of spine, poking through the vines. Kat shifts them away from it, stick wobbling under the weight, and I see its pelvis.

It’s a human body.

We don’t say anything.

Kat turns her neck slowly, looking up at me. I can’t move. The air is stiff. My skin feels cold.

She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. I look from her eyes to the grass, skirting around the edge of the scene, falling on her peeling sneakers sinking into the soft ground.

“Shit, do we call the cops?”

I don’t know. I look at her. She looks at me. I’ve never seen a real-life human skeleton before, and I have the feeling Kat hasn’t, either.

“It’s been dead a long time,” I say.

“He’s been dead,” she says, voice tight and vibrating. “Or she. I don’t know. Can’t you tell from the skeleton if it’s a boy or a girl? Is that a thing?”

“I think so, but I’m not a skeleton expert.”

“Fucking hell.”

Frail droplets of old rain poke at the crowns of our heads. I glance up.

It’s getting late.

“Maybe we should just go home,” I say.

“Just go home? Are-are you out of your fucking mind? We’ve got a...it’s not a. A fucking. Jesus, I don’t. --We can’t just go home!”

“You got a cell phone. Call nine-one-one, then, I dunno.”

“Is this something you call nine-one-one about?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Me neither.”

Kat turns back toward the skeleton, half-sunken into the underbrush. The pelvis is brown and white, smooth, with little pock marks along its corners. White and brown, like speckled hen’s eggs, like dirty snow banks. I wonder how long the Private Property signs have been guarding this secret.

“Shit, man, this is fucking spooky.” She rubs her hands up her biceps, curling around the knobs of her shoulders.

“That’s a word for it.”

She shoots me a look that I can’t decipher. Her brown eyes are like the muddy bottom of a pond, stirred up with unrest. Water droplets soak through the fringe of my hair, trickling down my forehead like summer sweat. I become intimately aware of my own breath, flexing my lungs underneath my ribcage. There’s a tightness, between my false ribs, sharp like metal lodged into the meat of my diaphragm. I quietly wheeze.

“We should get out of here,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Right now,” I say, but I don’t move and Kat doesn’t, either.

“Do we call the cops?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Me neither.”

Kat rubs her face, scrunching up all her skin along her skull. I think that men and women’s skulls are different, but I couldn’t say what makes them different.

“We need to get out of here,” I say. “Right now.”

Kat shifts on her haunches, all of her muscles coiled around her bones like overzealous boa constrictors. Each nob of her spine pokes out from under her tank top, rising like little eggs through the fabric.

“Kat.”

“Okay,” she says, and stands up. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I back my way out of the foliage, until my heel tangles in the chain-link fence. I twist my neck, like I’m throwing a car in reverse.

“We can’t call the cops,” I say, a numb epiphany rising in my esophagus, “because we’ll be charged with trespassing.”

“Shit.”

The earth is sharp, surrounding me, shapes I’ve always seen but never really looked at. Grotesque and menacing, rising in my vision.

The edge of the fence snags Kat’s tank top in a gnarled claw, and she flounders, the cotton ripping in a jagged line up her side. Her stick-and-poke snarls at me between the loose flaps.

“This place sucks,” she spits, palms knocking against my arm.

“You’re telling me.”

She rubs her elbows, knuckles mottled. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”

My heart is a wriggling rabbit in a stoat’s jaws. I swallow, a numb terror virulent in my blood. I’m sick, but I also don’t really feel anything. It’s a curious thing. “Yeah,” I say, the world swarming. “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”

“I just said that, you fucking retard, come on.” Kat’s hand on me shocks like bare skin hitting ice.

Am I bleeding? Am I bleeding? No. I’m not.

“Fucking come on!”

We slide down the hill on our asses, tearing up grass and dirt, dislodging deer ticks. I see the beer cans, a flash of steel on my left, as we clamber for the safety of the concrete.

We catch our breath as soon as our palms meet the roughness. It’s our starting point, a refuge. Our home away from our houses and our classrooms. “I think I’m gonna hurl,” Kat chokes.

“Me too,” I say, attention now on old soda, roiling in my gut. School lunch, writhing in my throat like a mass of tapeworms.

“Shit, what do we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know!”

“No, I don’t!”

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, panting. In this moment, she looks extra-human, superhuman, hyper-real. She looks like an animal I’ve never seen, that I’ve only read about.

“I should go home,” I say.

Kat doesn’t say anything.

“Is that okay?”

“Do whatever the fuck you want.”

“Kat, I don’t know if we can tell people about this.”

“I don’t think we can,” she says. “We’ve done something horrible.”

“What did we do?”

“I don’t know.”

Kat and I can’t speak. I think I know what she means, but I can’t articulate it. I know that I feel horrible. I don’t understand anything around me; it all seems nonsensical. I stagger toward the convenience store, three steps at a time, the world crooked and looming.

“Don’t talk about this with anyone,” I say.

“Christ, you think I’m dumber than dirt? Of course I won’t. The FBI is gonna order a hit on us.”

It’s possible, my feverish brain consents. Not outside the realm of possibility. We could be kicked out of school. Our parents will beat the shit out of us and leave us on the streets. We can’t talk about this with anyone. We broke the law. We broke the law and we saw a corpse.

No, we can’t ever talk about this. Not with any adults, at least. They’d kill us, and dump our bodies behind the chain link fence on Morris Hill.

\- - -

The darkness of my bedroom offers no comfort. I can just barely make out the stain on my ceiling, sagging over my pillow. It’s water damage, and sometimes I dream that the plaster finally bursts, drowning me.

I think of sledding with my mother, a dead man’s decaying body just ten feet away, buried in fresh snow. The idea makes the memory ugly, rancid, brown and swarming with flies. I’ve lost something good in myself.

The moon rises through my window, casting shadows, and the shadows form shapes. I can see them, white and black, rising like mountain ranges on my wall, the divots of the human spine.

In seventh grade health class, we learned all the bones of the human body. All the bones have names. We’re born with more bones than we die with. The skull is made of many bones that fuse together into one large, cracked dome once we leave infancy.

I wonder if we’re born whole, flaking from the start.

My room is too warm. I have the window open. My room is still too warm. It’s the end of October, and the heat makes me hysterical. Sweat slides down my face, staining my sheets.

Maybe he’s a dead woman. I wouldn’t know. Our bones are different, mine and Kat’s, we’re different animals. I think that’s sad, but it’s biological fact. When I die, I want the mortician to grind my bones to dust. I don’t care what they do with the rest. I don’t want to be thrown in some underbrush, for asshole teenagers to find years later. I don’t want to bother anybody, and so I don’t want to be known.

I blink. When I open my eyes, the kitchen door is being slammed open and shut. Pounding, like a hammering heart. I think of my mother, in her room, waking up to this shouting door. I need to close it, so that she doesn’t wake up.

My legs are heavy as they swing over the edge of my mattress. I’m getting too big for my bed, but I can’t tell my mother. It’s mortifying.

It’s dark outside, the period just before night becomes morning. The frightening hour, when monsters are real. My eyes see everything in low resolution, grainy like convenience store security footage.

There are too many dark crevices in our kitchen, in the gaps between the chair legs. Like eye sockets or deep pits. Wishing wells.

Kat is beyond the screen door, slamming it open and shut. The screen whips inward and outward, vibrating within its frame. She stares at me with dead eyes and open mouth. A ghoul. I rub my face, feeling nauseous and warm.

Nothing needs to be said. Her state is obvious to both of us. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel how she looks. At least I can keep it locked down, though. At least I can afford that measure of dignity. But still. Nothing needs to be said. We both know. We both know. We haven’t slept. We’re not going to sleep. Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time.

So what am I supposed to do? I grab the truck keys off the counter and we both climb into my mother’s truck. The seat is warm and wet against the thin cotton of my boxers, slick with humidity. I shift nervously, sliding the key into the ignition.

“I told my dad,” Kat says.

“Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know! But he just ignored me, anyways. The Patriots were on.”

“You shouldn’t tell your dad.”

She rubs her face, mumbling into her palm. “No shit, I don’t know why I told him.” 

I can’t say I blame her. But she should know by now not to do stupid things like that. She’s known her dad for sixteen years. I turn the ignition. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know...”

I flick on the headlights. “Okay.”

“Let’s just go to the corner market. The one closest to your house,” she says. She rhythmically thuds her upper back against the seat. “I want a soda.”

“Alright.” It’s misty out. Reminds me of a survival-horror video game. I’m waiting to see amputated hitchhikers on the side of the road. But there’s no one. There’s never anyone.

“These things don’t go away,” Kat murmurs into her seatbelt.

“No,” I say, knuckles white on the steering wheel. “No, they don’t.”

“Do you think we’re bad people?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I think we’re bad people.”

I don’t say anything.

Kat and I used to play video games together, before she found cooler crowds to hang out with on the weekends. Kat said she only likes the scary ones, the ones with dead sisters and vengeful Japanese ghosts. We didn’t hang out like that for very long, but I miss it a lot. Dylan’s a lot cooler than me; he smokes cigarettes and has an alcoholic father. I’m in honors classes and varsity cross-country. His locker is in the same hall as mine, though, so we say hi to each other sometimes. He seems nice. I think we had the same gym class, freshman year. I don’t remember very well; freshman year is like a crater in my memory.

I think I miss Kat, even when she’s right next to me. I haven’t known her a year, but I feel like she’s the best friend I’ve ever had. We’ve just been through something together, something big. But in my mother’s truck, right now, with the air conditioner blasting on our dried out faces, I feel like there’s a giant rift between us. Like shifting tectonic plates, pushing us ever further away from each other.

Loss isn’t an unfamiliar feeling. It’s too familiar, and that’s what disturbs me--how easy it is to lose people.

I turn off onto Sunset Street, toward the corner market. The fog is awful. I don’t feel in control of my body. Drifting. Kat wants a soda, so we’re going to go grab a soda. I’m a friend, and so I do what friends do. I do things I never want to do.

“I hate this weather,” I say. I realize that I’m not wearing pants. Or shoes.I was aware of this fact before, but its importance didn’t strike me until now. Kat and I are different, and so I shouldn’t be in my underwear around her. It’s embarrassing. It would be embarrassing, anyways, if I didn’t feel so tired and sweaty. I should turn around and go put some pants on. But Kat wants a soda, so I keep driving.

“Mornings are like this.”

“They didn’t used to be.”

Kat doesn’t say anything. I make the turn into the corner market.

I pull the stick into park, but neither of us gets out of the car. I leave it running. I think of the fumes leaving the back of the truck. A memory of English class runs roughshod over my brain, reminding me that the Nazis used to choke people to death on van fumes. I will never drive a van.

“It’s stupid to talk to your dad.”

Kat’s quiet, glassy eyes looking out the window. I can see the clammy raindrops against the plexiglass, reflected in her pupils. “You don’t get it,” she says, upper lip trembling.

“I guess not.”

“Don’t talk to me about my dad.” She looks at me, eyelids fluttering with disapproval. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I feel separated from the earth. Like there’s a barrier between me and the rest of the living world. The rain slams its fists against the window, trying to break in.

“You know,” she says, “if a body’s turned to a skeleton like that, like, brown and buried and all that, that means it’s been there a long time.”

“I know.”

“Like, nobody’s found it. At all.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if anybody looked for it at all.”

“I don’t know.”

“I want to go home,” she says, throat thick, “but I don’t know what home even fucking is. Do you? Does your house feel like home at all?”

“No.”

“Jesus, why is shit so fucked up.”

I shrug.

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Okay.”

“We saw a dead body, over there, yesterday, you know that?”

“I know that.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t know what to do.”

I don’t say anything.

“Listen,” she says, tucking a clump of hair behind her ear. “Listen to me. We’ve got to tell somebody. We’ve got to get help.”

“Help for what?”

“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know, okay, but things are fucked. I just. It’s. It’s fucked up. Do you think that body’s been in--in missing posters for decades, or something?”

“Could be decades. Maybe centuries.”

“Maybe centuries.”

The rain smacks into the windows, pinging off of the metal truck body like stray bullets. Kat stares out the windshield, squinting at something I can’t see.

“I wish I knew what snow was,” she says. “I’ve never seen snow, except in movies.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

“I’m jealous of you. I miss snow.”

“You can’t miss something you’ve never had.”

“Bullshit, you can miss everything you’ve never had and more. You miss things all the time that you don’t even know about.”

Kat, with her ratty hair and sad, white skin, she looks like an overgrown and underfed porcelain baby doll. I think of baby skulls. I don’t know what she’s talking about. It sounds like a lot of nonsense. She’s just very emotional, today. Not that I blame her; I’m emotional too. We’re both messes. At least I can keep it inside. At least I look normal, right now. I can see our breath, venting against the dashboard, for just a moment.

“What if he crawled through that fence, just to die there?”

“I don’t know,” I say, searching for my breath.

“I think he did that. What do you think?”

“I think somebody killed him, and dumped his body there. Or maybe it was a drug overdose.”

Kat doesn’t say anything. My mouth feels weird and rubbery, having said that. I’m painfully aware of how awful people can be. We start out with false expectations for ourselves. We think we’re better than we are.

I think it’s crazy that Kat thinks someone would just crawl into some underbrush to die, like a house cat. I think it’s naïve, at best.

Kat sits up, trying to settle her breathing. “I want to die like that skeleton did,” she says. “Or, I mean, I want my dead body to end up like it, at least.”

“Rotting by the old sawmill and nobody finding it for years?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t know what to say to that. So I don’t say anything.

“It’s natural,” she says.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“No caskets.”

“No caskets.”

“Just my body and all the animals and plants that’ll eat it. The same way I eat animals and plants.”

I really don’t know what to say to that. It’s an ugly, honest sentiment.

“I want animals and plants to eat my body,” she says, “the same way I eat animals and plants. And I feel like that’s sort of karmic justice. Having it that way.”

I lean down and turn up the air, dry cold blasting our elbows. I don’t want to see our breath again, but it’s too fucking hot outside.

We watch a cop car roll past us, the inside dark. Neither Kat nor I move. We feel guilty, but we don’t know why. Or maybe Kat does; I don’t. She probably does. I wouldn’t know. Maybe Kat doesn’t even feel guilty, but how could she not?

I think about that cop car. I think about getting out of the truck and running down the street after it, in my boxers, screaming. I really regret telling Kat she’s stupid for talking to her dad. I wish I could talk to literally anybody about this, even Kat’s shitty dad.

“I want to die in a hospital ICU,” I say.

Kat nods her head, chewing on the inside of her cheek.

I remember what this road looks like, covered in snow. White and riddled with potholes. The corner market parking lot with its massive snow banks. I never appreciated it, because I assumed it was natural. Natural things aren’t appreciated, because they’re ordinary. Like green lawns, or algae-ridden ponds.

“I want them to pump my corpse full of embalming fluid, and I want to be buried in a metal casket, underground.”

Kat keeps nodding, nodding, listening to me, misunderstanding me. It’s a horrible thing, to be understood. I’m glad no one understands each other. We’re all islands, aren’t we? Private property, fences miles-long. It's better, that way. 

“God, I want to become a mummy,” I murmur, pressing my cheek against the window. The cop car is out of sight, down the road. 

I can feel Kat shift, in the passenger seat. She doesn’t say anything, though.

Shivering and thin, we sit in my mother’s truck. What is there to say? Kat shouldn’t talk to her dad and I can’t talk to my mom. Maybe we should call a mortician. A coroner. An obstetrician. Something. I don’t know. I don’t think there’s an adult who can help us. No cop is gonna help us. He’ll probably arrest us, for trespassing. The world isn’t just; it’s too chaotic to be just. People are too senseless to consistently do the right thing.We’re too young and stupid to know what the right thing is.

I think about Kat’s dad, staring blankly at a Patriots game while Kat shakily tells him about the horrible thing she’s seen. He doesn’t hear her. He doesn’t care at all. How does that feel, to be treated like a ghost while one’s still alive? I wouldn’t know. I’ve never even left the northeast; I have no idea what South Carolina is like. Kat’s probably seen the ocean, hasn’t she? Maybe I should ask her what the ocean smells like. I’ve heard it smells like trash and tossed recyclables, but Kat must know.

I don’t know the world in the same way Kat does. She sees things I don’t. She has a father and a stick-and-poke tattoo. Different specters haunt the two of us, gnarled clawed hooked into our backs.

But we share one, now, don’t we? We share this one.

That shouldn’t make me happy. But it sort of does.

We watch the cop car roll past us and we sit in the fog, listening to the air conditioner. Neither of us says anything. And while Kat internally tears herself to pieces, I begin to settle into an assuring, uneasy peace.

 

 


End file.
